Darts often fill Forum's air--and not just because Girard is
peeved. "Some of our best ideas happen when darts are
flying," says Girard, who frequently enlists toys as helpers
during in-house strategy sessions. "With toys in our hands,
creative ideas really get flowing," she says.

Sound wacky? Listen up: When Girard and her husband, Francis,
started Forum six years ago, businesses were baffled by the idea of
a facility that provided only meeting rooms, not sleeping rooms too
(as hotels do). But the couple persisted, and today Forum has
expanded into a 20-employee company whose meeting rooms are
constantly booked by both Fortune 500 companies and smaller
firms.

The secret to their success? "Our ongoing commitment to
thinking creatively about meeting client needs," Girard says.
That same creative impulse has prompted her to put baskets of toys
(including dart guns, Frisbees and footballs) into the rooms Forum
rents out. "Usually, at the end of the day, we go into the
meeting rooms and toys are just everywhere," says Girard,
whose continuing struggle is to differentiate Forum from its
competitors. Then again, how many hotels offer meeting attendees
both video conferencing capabilities and dart guns?

"Our clients tell us these toys help people open up,"
says Girard. "It's hard to be stuffy when you've just
been hit by a dart."

The Girards' business is creativity in action--taking a tiny
idea (making meeting room rentals your only business) and creating
powerful business magic. So often in business, the
"creative" label is limited to big, bold ideas--"but
much creativity lies in what seems like small ideas," says
Roger von Oech, author of A Whack on the Side of the Head
(Warner Books). "To me, there's potential for creativity
in every job and every business."

Just think about Starbucks. What could be more mundane than a
cup of coffee? But creative product delivery and marketing have
transformed a humdrum staple into a multi-
million-dollar business. "Every business needs to be looking
for creativity in everything it does," says Kathleen R. Allen,
author of Launching New Ventures (Upstart) and a professor
of entrepreneurship at the University of Southern California (USC)
in Los Angeles. "It's not just about being creative with
the product. You need to be creative in how you deliver it, how you
market it and how you interact with customers. There are so many
areas in business where creativity makes a difference."

Either way, though, big idea or something more mundane,
"creativity is a business survival skill," says von
Oech.

Raymond Gleason agrees. "Without creativity, you are
standing still--and nowadays that means you're losing ground.
Lose enough ground, and your business will die," says Gleason,
a professor of strategy and creativity at George Fox University in
Newberg, Oregon, and co-founder of engineering design firm Santa
Barbara Applied Research in Santa Barbara, California, which he
helped grow into a multimillion-dollar business before he sold his
share to pursue his dream of teaching. "Any entrepreneur
absolutely must be creative to succeed."

But isn't it hard to be creative? Von Oech doesn't think
so. "Everybody is born creative," he says.

So why does creativity often seem so difficult? Mike Vance,
former dean of Disney University (The Walt Disney Co.'s
training program) and now chairman of the Creative Thinking
Association of America, has wrestled with instilling a more
creative spirit in companies as diverse as Apple and GE, and he
knows why the process seems difficult: "So much that's
said about creativity is both unhelpful and untrue," contends
Vance. "You just aren't going to get more creative
following the techniques in most books. But there are ways to
heighten creativity."

Building Blocks

So how can you up your creativity? When Vance steps in to put a
business on a creative path, his first suggestion might seem odd:
Get real.

"Forget all the positive thinking stuff you've learned.
It's a barrier to creativity," urges Vance. "The only
place to start being more creative is to ask yourself how things
really are--and to honestly answer that question. Often
entrepreneurs kid themselves, seeing only what they want to see.
But the universe isn't so forgiving."

Mind you, Vance isn't advising entrepreneurs to plunge into
pessimism. "You need a dream," he says. "Walt
Disney, with whom I worked for many years, certainly had dreams.
But he understood reality and what he needed to do to
succeed."

So let's put it bluntly: Don't overestimate your product
or service, don't underestimate your competitors, and never
exaggerate consumer demand for what you're doing. That leads to
delusion, not creativity, says Vance.

The next building block, says Vance, involves turning up the
tension. Doesn't tension stifle creativity? Not according to
Vance: "I must have 5,000 books in my library that say you
need a relaxed, at-ease environment to promote creativity. But my
personal experience says the opposite works best. The creative
juices flow where there's conflict and tension that puts people
on edge."

Vance isn't suggesting that companies adopt cultures akin to
war zones, but he praises workplaces where people can speak their
minds--even when it ruffles feathers. "At Apple, Steve Jobs
was the grain of sand in the oyster, the irritant--and the Mac
resulted," Vance says. "Almost any company will benefit
from irritants on staff. Don't put too much emphasis on
harmony--that can undermine the commitment to creativity."

A third building block is laughter. "Humor can really
foster creativity," says Vance. "Thomas Edison started
every workday with a joke-telling session--and look at the
creativity that came out of his lab. Humor is the unmasking of the
hypocritical, and what makes us laugh often is seeing how things
are screwed up--then, sometimes, seeing how we can fix them.
Whenever I go into a company and don't hear much laughter, I
know it's not a creative place."

The fourth building block is to equip a "kitchen for the
mind," an idea Vance brought home from his tour as a soldier
in the Korean War. Over there, he called a sleeping bag home, and a
lonely, even frightening home it was--until an idea clicked in his
head, and he transformed a standard government-issue sleeping bag
into his own "kitchen for the mind," a place where he
could go beyond fear into creativity. He did so by augmenting the
spartan sleeping bag with personal touches--family photos, books,
writing paper, a radio, tins of cookies, and other creature
comforts scrounged from a limited universe of possibilities. These
small changes radically transformed the bag into a place where
Vance felt at home--and where good ideas came into his head.

The relevance for business? "Every business needs a kitchen
for the mind--a space designed to nurture creativity," says
Vance. Supplies needn't be costly or elaborate--a chalkboard, a
meeting table, a coffee pot, maybe a stereo, possibly toys (like
the Girards' darts), and "anything else that stimulates
creative juices in you and your team," adds Vance. "In
teaching creativity for years, I have found that one of the biggest
ingredients is having a communal meeting space that encourages
it."

Corporate behemoths from GE to Motorola have been busy setting
up their own creative kitchens, equipped with everything from VCRs
to high-powered multimedia computers. Can't compete with those
expenditures? The good news for entrepreneurs is that "when
people's resources are limited, their ingenuity can go crazy,
[and they can] really come up with great ideas," says Vance.
"Never listen to people who say entrepreneurs don't have
the resources for creativity. You have all you need."

A final building block agreed on by almost every creativity
teacher is to challenge the status quo. "Conformity to the
status quo is a real enemy of creativity," says Vance.

Need an example? Twenty years ago, everybody knew that computers
were coming and believed that the fight for dominance would be
between mainframes and minicomputers. As for personal computers,
they were hobbyists' toys, useless for business computing.
Silly as that sounds, everybody believed it to be true--and only
renegades like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs saw a different potential
for PCs.

"The real beginning point for creativity is emptying your
mind--pushing out the ideas you know to be true," says
Gleason. "The more successful a businessperson is, the more
resistance there can be to doing this. But if you don't, you
cannot be really creative."

Steps To Creativity

There are still more concrete ways to maximize creativity in
your workplace, and USC professor Kathleen R. Allen has plenty of
experience in spelling out little steps that, when diligently
applied, can result in great ideas.

Carry a notebook. "You never know when an idea will
occur to you--an idea for a new business or a better way of doing
what you're presently doing. As you drive, watch TV, eat lunch,
ideas pop into your head. Unless you write them down, you will not
remember them," says Allen.

Think opportunistically. "Wherever you go, really
pay attention," Allen advises. "Most of us navigate
through our world on autopilot, but when we start paying
attention--when we start questioning what we are seeing and
why--good ideas can occur to us."

Network. "So many ideas come up when you meet new
people. Somebody will say `I wish a company did this,' and,
bingo, an idea for a business comes to you," says Allen.

Think in opposites. "Everybody says recessions are
bad--but haven't they been good for some businesses? The past
recession gave birth to a huge outsourcing industry, for
instance," says Allen. "For every idea--for every sacred
cow--there is an opposite idea, and, sometimes, exploring the
opposite is where entrepreneurs will find the best
ideas."

Reinvent the wheel. "Ask yourself how you can put a
new twist on an old product or service. Think about the addition of
baking soda to toothpaste, for instance," Allen says. Take any
product, and come up with 50 unexpected uses for it. "Keep in
mind that sometimes the most creative uses [involve] literally
smashing the product and coming up with something entirely
new," says Allen. Can you list 50 uses for a Styrofoam cup? An
ashtray? Don't quit until you complete the list because,
frequently, persistent elaboration of an idea is what finally
yields a commercial creative success.

Challenge your ruts. "We do the same things, the
same way, every day. This is a primary barrier to creativity,"
Allen warns. "Often we need to feel a little uncomfortable--we
need to experience new things--to get creative sparks." If
every day you lunch at a burger place, start mixing in stops at
Vietnamese or Italian eateries. If you always drink a beer with
Friday's dinner, drink a glass of wine. If you only listen to
country music, on tonight's drive home, tune in to a rock
station. Alone, none of these steps may trigger creative ideas,
says Allen, but taken together, "anything we do that forces us
out of our normal environment will let us see things in new,
different ways."

Advanced Creativity

Follow the above steps, and creative ideas are sure to start
bubbling in your brain. But then what? How do you turn those ideas
into viable business plans? Two tactics are central to making the
most of every good idea:

1. Reality-test. "Ideas are great, but how do they
match up with marketplace realities?" asks Vance. In other
words: Don't become self-satisfied just because an idea seems
good out of the box. "Test every good idea against what the
marketplace needs and wants," says Allen. "Start by
asking friends for feedback, then expand into a broader
test."

2. Keep refining. "A key lesson I've learned in
interviewing many highly creative people is that they continually
criticize their own ideas. Traditional brainstorming techniques
taught us not to criticize, but really creative people do the
opposite, looking for ways to make their ideas better," says
Jack Ricchiuto, a Cleveland certified management consultant and
author of Collaborative Creativity (Oakhill Press).
"Criticism doesn't stifle ideas--it makes them better.

"The creative process frequently involves going beyond the
first idea. Uncreative people commonly marry the first good idea
that comes along. But creative people detach from their ideas and
refine them. They know that the more ideas, the better."

In the end, the real secret to creativity is practice. "The
more we do it, the better we get," says Ricchiuto. "The
mythology is that creativity is a genetically determined trait. But
it can be developed in all of us--if we keep questioning what we
see and keep looking for creative solutions and ideas. Practice is
why the truly creative stay truly creative--and it's how all of
us can get much more creative, too."